“Okay,” I said.
“Okay?” my dear friend and mentor lit right up. “I knew I could count on you.”
I sat up straighter, trying to manage the strange nausea in my stomach.
“I’ll have Justin send over the details. Do you want him to write a few remarks for you?”
“About the senator?” I asked. What in the world would I say about him?
Once, he broke my finger at the dinner table. One minute I was handing him a plate, the next he’d snapped my pinky finger back until it popped.
“That would be great,” I said and stood up. “Have Justin send me everything I need.”
“You’re not going to stay for lunch?”
“No, actually. I’ve got another engagement for lunch.”
“With who?” Caroline asked. She asked like she was surprised. Like it was impossible I had friends. And she wasn’t wrong, but I was allowed to have some dignity.
“Just a friend from college,” I lied and picked up my purse. “I’ll look forward to Justin’s notes.”
I left her office, aware of her concern chasing me out the door. Justin sat at his desk in her outer sanctum, and I gave him my breeziest smile. “I look forward to seeing you at the fundraiser!”
“Let me—” he said, standing up from his desk.
“I’m good. Take care.” I pushed the button, and the elevator opened as if it had been waiting for me. Which, since it was Caroline’s private elevator, it probably had been.
I heard one of the other doors open as I stepped inside, leaning back against the glass and marble. The low murmur of voices as the doors began to slide shut.
“She’s leaving?” asked a brogue that made me stand up straight. Was that . . .?
Before the door could shut, a hand braced it open, and I came face to face with Ronan.
6
Speechless, I gaped at him as he stepped into the elevator. The doors closed behind him, shrinking the square footage around us to absolutely nothing. I stepped back into the furthest corner of the elevator.
“What are you doing?” I asked. It was ingrained, being frantic alone with a man that wasn’t Jim.
“Are you all right?” he asked, reaching for my elbow. And I absolutely flailed away from him so he wouldn’t touch me.
“I’m fine,” I said, embarrassed down to my core.
“You’re a terrible liar.” He dropped his hand without actually touching me, and I’d never been so relieved and disappointed in my life.
I laughed, low in my throat because he had no idea what a liar I could be.
He reached behind his back and pressed the button that stopped the elevator. We lurched to a halt, and I braced myself against the wall behind me so I wouldn’t bounce into him.
“What are you doing?” I cried.
“Why are you upset?”
“Because you are like . . . kidnapping me?”
“Kidnapping?” His grin was . . . well, it was something. And I didn’t like it. I didn’t like how it made me feel. “Are you all right, Poppy?”
“Stop pretending you care!”
“Someone should care,” he said, quietly. “Someone should care about you, Princess.”
Oh god. Oh god.
“And you think you’re the man to do that?” Why did I say that? He was making a mess of me with his concern and proximity. I was unused to both. “Never mind. I don’t care.”
“Do you want me to?”
“Of course not.”
“Such a liar today. It’s hard to believe you’re the same girl I met at that party.”
“Because I’m not,” I snapped. He leaned a shoulder against the wall. Like we were two people chatting at a bar. A party. Any two people.
“Why are you upset, Poppy?”
I stared at his shirt. The white dress shirt, sleeves rolled up. The neck loose like he’d been working hard at something, but I couldn’t imagine what this man worked hard at. “My husband died,” I said, because I hadn’t figured out why I was really upset.
“That’s why you’re near tears, running from Caroline’s office?”
“Of course.”
His grin was a direct shot to my chest. “What am I supposed to do with a girl with so many lies in her mouth?”
There was something . . . maybe the way he said mouth. Or the way he was looking at me. The tiny elevator. Any of it. All of it. But I got this sense, this very real sense that what he wanted to do to me was dirty.
And I could count the number of times I’d thought of something dirty in the last two years on one hand.
But at this moment, locked in an elevator with Ronan whose last name I didn’t know, I imagined, in one white-hot second, him pushing me up against the wall. Stepping up tight against me. That lethal body of his pressed to mine.
A blush incinerated my face. My neck.
“Oh, what are you thinking?” he asked. His voice low. His smile a charming twist. “What dark thing am I doing to you in your mind?”
I swallowed, and he grinned like he was relishing my discomfort, and I realized that I was a toy to him, the same way I’d been a toy to my husband. It was just a different game.
“Make the elevator go,” I said. The blush on my neck was gone, though that thought I’d had would haunt me.
“Tell me what you were thinking.”
“That you only want to hurt me, like everyone else.”
Something in him shifted; some unseen darkness leapt in his eyes. His face. But his expression didn’t change.
I gave him no time for more sarcasm or false concern. Some half-baked flirtation for the pitiful widow. I reached past him, ignoring the warmth of his body and the smell of his skin and pressed the button that made the elevator resume its descent. Within seconds the door was open, and I walked around him towards freedom. Part of me expected him to follow. My husband was always going to have the last word. There was no situation where I was allowed to walk away.
But then, I was oddly disappointed when Ronan didn’t.
My driver, of course, was waiting for me, back door open, and I knew that Justin had called him and told him I was on my way down. I slipped into my seat, and the door slammed behind me. When I turned, before the car drove off, I saw Ronan standing there. On the sidewalk, Caroline’s building behind him, the madness of Manhattan spinning around him like he was the untouched, unmoved center of everything.
Ronan.
He didn’t wave or take the ten steps it would take to open my car door and pull me out, and I was both relieved and upset that he didn’t. Feeling foolish followed, of course, it always did. But still he stood there, looking at me, studying me through the glass of the door. Through the span of the two years and two other times we’d seen each other.
My pulse hammered in my throat – and it wasn’t fear. It wasn’t anything but the normal violence of being alive. Very alive.
“Where to, ma’am?” Theo asked.
“The nearest hot dog cart,” I said, and we pulled away from the curb.
7
The Valentino ballgown swirled in shades of light blue around my bodice and flowed out into the skirt in indigo and then cobalt and black down to the floor. It was dramatic and elegant. Swishy around my legs and forgiving around my waist.